


In The Heart

by semele



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 13:00:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5586541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semele/pseuds/semele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Ark never malfunctions, and the dropship never goes to the ground. Some years after Octavia gets released from the Skybox, janitor Blake meets zero-g Reyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In The Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maybe_now](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybe_now/gifts).



> My wonderful prompt was:
> 
>  
> 
> _I know an alien with brown eyes._  
>  A red heart that skips beats. A grey mind that never slept and never fell for love..or simply won’t admit the slip. Scars cover its soft skin but don’t callous the flesh, that flesh that has touched but never held. That spirit of an immortal wouldn’t die.. even in the crash. That alien with brown eyes that never wept, made an alien of me.
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you so much for letting me play with this! I hope you enjoy. Happy New Year!

Being loved is something Bellamy takes for granted. It’s funny how he always kept feeling that – even in the two years he spent alone, desperate and worried sick, banging his head against the wall relentlessly to be allowed to see O in the Skybox, to send her a message, get a word from her. On the day of her eighteenth birthday, he just happened to have a cleaning shift on Farm, and just happened to be held back until way after the announcement, Octavia Blake, released; but love was the only reason why he swallowed yet another petty humiliation, didn’t punch his supervisor in the face, and made it back home. It didn’t occur to him, back then, to stop and think about how O loves him, because it was as obvious as breathing, unlike having her back, God, having her back, healthy and whole, if a little worse for wear.

It’s how things are over the next five years: Bellamy’s life is mostly hell of pettiness and red tape, restrictions placed on him because of his combat training, and weird coincidences he’s pretty sure are designed by someone who wants to make an example out of him. But even though he has to jump endless bureaucratic hoops, he always has a home to come back to, no matter how much he fights with his sister, or the friends he’s suddenly allowed to have. He builds himself a reputation of sorts, that mouthy janitor who always walks the straight and narrow, because the louder he gets, the more the guards would love to catch him with contraband moonshine or some simple negligence that could get him into serious trouble. Most days, he quite likes this new and thicker skin he wears; it wins him friends, and it wins him enemies, turns him from angry to smart, from impulsive to bitter, from observant to outspoken. 

When he decides to run for a Council seat, it has nothing to do with love at all.

***

When he first meets Raven Reyes, he’s mopping the floor of her workshop on Mecha, and she doesn’t notice him at all.

(Yes she did, she’ll tell him much later. He’s hard to miss, all tall and broody, she’ll say, then jokingly poke the tip of his nose before jumping into his arms, and letting him wrap her legs around his waist.)

What it takes is a leak on Farm, carbon dioxide getting where it shouldn’t, and Monty’s dad stuck in the infirmary for two scary weeks, not that Bellamy is allowed to visit. But he is allowed to find the zero-g who fixed the leak, and try to get some answers out of her; at least that’s the plan.

He ends up in bed with her the very next day, and no one is more surprised than both of them.

The only thing Raven takes for granted is her own brain, quick and bright, and shimmering with ideas no one can keep up with, but Bellamy can’t resist trying. Touch-starved and bored as he is, he’s immediately drawn to her, one game of chess and he’s gone. Raven Reyes, he learns, can beat him with one hand tied behind her back, and there is one moment there when the world stops spinning; when he baits her, his pawn sneaking around to lure out her queen, and she catches him without breaking a sweat.

She blocks the pawn instead of sacrificing it, tells him she won’t vote for him, and suddenly he wants to kiss her.

The first few days are quite awkward, two people drawn to each other when they should be strangers, but they’re both lonely, and curious, and fuck it, it just clicks, the way they move around each other, exchanging words and touches. After two nights, Bellamy stops trying to get dressed and leave late in the evening, and Raven falls asleep curled into him, small and trusting and _his_ in some inexplicable way. 

He warns her that mixing up with him is courting trouble, but she clears a shelf for him to keep a change of clothes. Later, he brings her over to have dinner with him and O, but they don’t really find it in themselves to talk about love.

(Two weeks later, Raven’s supervisors move her away from her stars, and put her at a table holding broken radios and other mind-numbingly boring things. _So you can decompress,_ they tell her. _Just for a month._ She doesn’t spacewalk for another three, and they don’t talk about that too much, either.)

***

The first time he shares food with her, he doesn’t think about it twice.

Bellamy has a string of ridiculous double shifts that leave him too tired to think, and Raven shows up on Factory on day four, worried and slightly frustrated, worn down after seven weeks away from the stars. She finds him in his quarters, about to change out of his work gear, his and O’s rations sitting on the table, waiting.

“Have you eaten?” he asks quickly as he tries to find a clean shirt. “Help yourself, I’ll be right back.”

In a way, it feels like pieces falling back together: two rations on a table set for three, minus hushed voices, be quiet, Octavia, be quiet, no one can hear. Tired, he completely misses Raven’s strange expression when she sits down to eat, and it’s O who notices she’s just nibbling on the food instead of eating. He only turns his head when she makes a joke about it, and Raven huffs the way she does when she has something to hide.

On the next day, she shows up again, and makes Bellamy’s jaw drop when she pulls an apple from under her shirt. Fruit is a luxury, something he only sees when he’s cleaning that one tiny greenhouse on Farm, no touching, but apparently being a zero-g has its perks, because Raven clearly knows her way around it, and she even brought a small knife to slice the shiny skin. Mesmerized, Bellamy watches as she cuts the small orb into three equal pieces, then hands two of them to him and O like this isn’t special, and she isn’t sharing something precious.

“We get one each before Unity Day,” she explains when she spots his gaze. “I thought…”

It’s one of those sentences she never finishes, but she does stay the night afterwards, even though with O in the room, he can’t do more than kiss her forehead goodnight, and hold her tight. 

Only much later does he realize that maybe that was exactly why she stayed.

***

The elections are hell on wheels, full of backstabbing and games he has no interest in, even though he has some idea how to move around them. He knows he could learn if he wanted. Trouble is, he doesn’t want.

“Apparently I’m supposed to learn Spanish now,” he rants one night, oblivious to the fact that he’s suddenly sharing strategy with her. “It’s supposed to make people like me better. What the hell, Raven? I never spoke Spanish in my life. So what, I’m gonna learn a few phrases and hope they don’t notice I mispronounce them? How the fuck is this a good idea?”

Raven’s feet are set firmly on the floor, and it’s hard to imagine they were out in space earlier today, floating slowly but surely among nothing as her hands worked relentlessly to keep the Ark alive. But her eyes, when she looks at him, are still a bit absent, lost somewhere between her stars, and she jumps a little when he touches her shoulder.

“They moved me from Sinclair’s team to a different workshop,” she says when he keeps silent. “Apparently it’s a promotion. I’ll be fixing Alpha now.”

And not sniffing around, seeing negligence on poorer stations.

This night, he spends alone, because Raven’s old team throws her a goodbye party, and he needs to work on a speech anyway, even though it’s stupid and pointless, and he knows that as soon as he sees people on the gathering, he’ll speak spontaneously anyway. But there are figures to memorize and slogans to review, and those fucking Spanish phrases he’s apparently supposed to master overnight, _you’re dating a Mecha, Blake, show them some love_.

He gets called on an emergency shift two hours before the gathering, because that’s one of those things that just happen to him, and he doesn’t even swear when he gets the news, just grabs his bucket and reports on duty.

Raven seems surprised when he picks her up after work, and walks home with her hand in hand. He doesn’t have anything for her even though it’s good form to give a gift to celebrate a promotion, but he does lean to kiss her cheek as a hello, and he’ll remember, years later, how she leaned into it automatically, her movements soft and fluid, taking his affection for granted.

(She loses her zero-g license two days after he wins the Council seat; a heart murmur, the doctors say, one that should never have been overlooked. She looks stunned when she comes to his quarters, her feet dragging heavily on the floor, and she refuses to cry, refuses to scream, refuses to speak. The only thing she’ll do is cling to him once he opens his arms, and let out a dry sob that makes her entire body shake for a moment before it slumps against his, then rises up, ready for a fight.

It’s a heart problem alright.)

**Author's Note:**

> Some of the plot originated as a roleplay scenario with shortitude, who definitely should get my first born.


End file.
